The Complete Elizabeth Gilbert: Eat, Pray, Love; Committed; The Last American Man; Stern Men & Pilgrims (160 page)

“Last time it was three hours,” John shouted back.

“Goodness!” Margie said.

John laughed and got a mouthful of water, which gagged him. He coughed wetly. Peg looked around and saw that they had been pulled out far past the jetties, a great distance down from the house. Without saying that they were doing so, the four friends began swimming toward the beach. They were trying in a casual way to head home. They were all getting tired, but nobody wanted to speak about it. For some time, they tried to swim toward shore but did not seem to make any progress. They stopped joking with each other and then even stopped speaking.

After a long while, J.J. said, “Oh, fuck.”

“What?” Peg asked her boyfriend; she was breathless. “What is it?”

“Jellyfish.”

Another considerable silence. By this point they had stopped pretending that they weren’t aiming for shore.

Then John shouted out, “J.J.! My friend!”

“Yeah,” said J.J.

“I’m getting . . . um . . . rather tired.”

“Okay,” said J.J. “We’ll go in, then.”

John rolled his eyes, almost with annoyance. “My legs are killing me,” he said.

“We’ll go in now,” J.J. said. “I’ll help you.”

“My legs are very . . . um . . . heavy,” said John.

“You’ve got to take off your jeans, John,” said J.J. “Can you do that?”

The rain was cold right through the scalps of the friends, and their breathing was wet and sloppy.

John grimaced, trying to get his jeans off. He was going under, coming back up, going under again. J.J. swam behind him and held him up by sticking his arms under John’s armpits. John squirmed around more, and then his jeans popped up to the surface, where they floated for a moment, dark, like the hide of a shark, and then sank.

“We’re going in,” J.J. shouted. “If you girls can make it in, then go. If you can’t make it in, don’t get tired. Just stay out here.”

Peg and Margie did not have the breath to answer.

The boys swam away, and a wave immediately separated them from their girlfriends. The girls watched them for a while. It looked as though the boys couldn’t make it past the jetties.

Margie’s teeth chattered. Peg swam over to her and grabbed Dumbo’s inflatable head.

“No,” Margie said. “Mine.”

“I have to,” Peg said. Her legs ached from the cold water. When she kicked hard to warm them, she kicked Margie. Margie started crying. Margie and Peg were pulled up on a wave, and they could see then that John and J.J. were not much closer to the beach. Peg held her breath and shut her eyes. A wave slapped her. She opened her eyes into water and breathed water and swallowed it.

“We won’t make it back,” Margie said.

Peg kicked her.

“Shut up!” Margie shouted, although Peg had not spoken.

Peg kicked Margie again. The girls treaded water and tried to see the progress of John and J.J. toward the beach. Which, after a great passage of time, the boys did reach. John and J.J. did eventually reach the beach, and when Peg saw this, she said to Margie, “Look!”

“Shut up!” Margie said, and kicked Peg.

Peg could see J.J. pulling John out of the water. J.J. was in fact dragging John from the sea by his hair. A caveman and his wife. J.J. lugged John up the beach and dropped down beside him.

Margie did not look. Her eyes were closed and her mouth was open. Then Peg did not look anymore, either. She could imagine J.J. slouched over John, who may or may not have been breathing. She could imagine J.J. taking some time to throw up the seawater from his gut, lean his forehead against the sand, retch a little.

Then J.J. would stand on his strong and handsome legs, a little shaky. Peg could imagine it. J.J. would look out at the water to where Margie and Peg should be. He would probably not be able to spot them. His ragged breathing would continue, and he would stand, hands on his hips, slightly hunched over. He would look very much like an exhausted and heroic star soccer player, after a remarkable save.

J.J. would stand there. He would have to decide whether to come out after Margie and Peg or telephone the coast guard
and wait for help. It didn’t matter what he decided, because he would hate Margie and Peg either way. Whatever he decided, he would certainly hate them for it. Peg was sure of that, as she was treading water with her eyes closed. Peg did not have to watch more of this scene unfolding. No, she did not. Peg did not have to see it happen to know what would happen.

J.J. would hate Peg and Margie for demanding that difficult decision from him, just as Peg now hated Margie for crying in the water beside her. Just as Peg now hated spoiled and foolish John for taking his friends out there in the rough ocean. Just as (most of all) Peg now hated her handsome boyfriend J.J. Peg hated J.J. for standing on the beach while she herself got dragged out deeper to sea. She hated him for being a strong swimmer. She hated him for wondering what to decide and for catching his breath, and she hated him (most of all) for hating her.

N
O FAULT
of his own, but Denny Brown did not know very much about his parents and their work. Denny’s parents were both nurses. His mother was a nurse in the burn unit at Monroe Memorial Hospital, and his father was a private duty nurse, also known as a visiting nurse. Denny was aware of these facts, naturally, but he did not know much past that.

Denny Brown did not know the extent of horrors that his mother encountered daily in her work at the burn unit. He did not know, for instance, that his mother sometimes cared for patients whose skin was essentially gone. He did not know that his mother was considered an exceptional nurse, who was famous for never losing her stomach and for keeping the other nurses from losing theirs. He did not know that his mother spoke to every burned patient, even the doomed ones, in cool and reassuring tones of conversation, never hinting at the agony of their prospects.

Denny Brown knew even less about his father’s nursing career,
other than that it was unusual and embarrassing to have a
father
who was a nurse. Mr. Brown sensed his son’s shame, which was but one of the many reasons he did not talk about any aspect of his work in the home. There was no way, therefore, that Denny could have known that his father secretly would have preferred to have been a psychiatric nurse rather than a private duty nurse. Back in nursing school, Mr. Brown had trained at a large mental hospital, in the men’s ward. He had loved it there, and his patients had adored him. If he’d not actually felt that he could cure his patients, he’d certainly believed himself capable of bettering their lives.

However, there was no mental hospital in Monroe County. Therefore, Denny Brown’s father had spent his married life working as a private duty nurse instead of the psychiatric nurse he ought to have been. He worked purely out of economic necessity and did not enjoy his assignments. His talents were unrecognized. His patients were old, dying people. They did not even notice him, except in spare moments, when they came out of their death marches only long enough to be suspicious of him. The patients’ families were suspicious as well, always accusing private duty nurses of stealing. Society as a whole, in fact, was suspicious of male nurses. So Mr. Brown was met with skepticism in every new job, in every new home, as though he were something perverse.

What’s more, Denny Brown’s father believed that private duty nursing was not nursing at all, but merely tending. It frustrated him that he did more bathing and wiping than he did nursing. Year after year, Denny Brown’s father sat in home after home, watching over the slow and expensive deaths of one wealthy, aged cancer patient after another.

Denny Brown did not know anything about any of this.

Denny Brown (at age fifteen) did not know that his mother regretted the rough things that she often said. She’d had a wise
mouth as a little girl, and she had a wise mouth as a grown woman. She also had a dirty mouth. The wise mouth had always been with her. The dirty mouth came from her year of nursing in Korea during the war. In any case, she often said things that she didn’t mean or later was privately sorry for. Very privately sorry.

For instance, there was a young nurse named Beth in the burn unit where Denny’s mother worked. Beth had a drinking problem. One day, Beth confessed to Denny’s mother that she was pregnant. Beth didn’t want to have an abortion but couldn’t imagine keeping a child on her own.

Beth said desperately, “I was thinking of selling my baby to a nice, childless couple.”

And Denny Brown’s mother said, “The way you drink, you could sell that baby to the fucking circus.”

Mrs. Brown was instantly mortified at herself. She avoided Beth for days, secretly asking herself, as she often did,
Why am I such a horrible human being?

At the end of Denny Brown’s sophomore year, he was invited to the Monroe High School Academic Awards Banquet. Denny’s father had to work, but Mrs. Brown attended. Denny got a handful of awards that night. He was a very good, though not exceptional, student. He was a smart kid, but he did not excel in any particular subject, as he did not know yet whether he was very good at any particular thing. So Denny received a small handful of awards, including a certificate of merit, honoring his participation in something called Youth Art Month.

“Youth Art Month,” his mother said on the ride home. “Youth Art Month.”

She pronounced it slowly: “Youth . . . Art . . . Month . . .”

She pronounced it quickly: “YouthArtMonth.”

She laughed and said, “There’s just no right way to say that, is there? That’s just an ugly goddamn phrase, isn’t it?”

And then Denny Brown’s mother recognized her son’s silence. And she too was silent for the rest of the drive.

She drove on. She did not speak, but she was thinking of Denny. She was thinking,
He does not know how sorry I am
.

Denny Brown did not know, at the beginning of his sixteenth summer, what he was going to do for a job. He did not know what he was interested in. He did not know what was out there for work.

After a few weeks of looking, he ended up taking a part-time job at the Monroe Country Club. He worked in the men’s locker room. It was a fancy, carpeted locker room, fragrant with hidden deodorizing agents. The distinguished men of Monroe Township would use the locker room to dress for the golf course. They would put on their cleated golf shoes, leaving their dress shoes on the floor in front of their lockers. Denny Brown did not know anything about golf, but this was not required for his work. It was Denny’s job to polish the men’s dress shoes while the men themselves golfed. He shared this job with a sixteen-year-old boy from his neighborhood named Abraham Ryan. There was no apparent reason that two people were needed for the job. Denny did not know why these men needed their shoes polished every day, in the first place. Denny did not know why he had been hired.

Some days, Denny and Abraham would have to polish no more than three pairs of shoes during the entire course of their shift. They took turns. When they weren’t working, they were instructed to stay in the corner of the locker room, next to the electric shoe-polishing machine. There was only one stool in the locker room, and Denny and Abraham took turns sitting on it. While one sat, the other would lean against the wall.

Denny and Abraham were supervised by the Monroe Country Club sports and recreation manager, a serious older man named Mr. Deering. Mr. Deering would look in on them every
hour or so, and say, “Look sharp, boys. The best men in Monroe come through this door.”

There was one more component to their job besides polishing shoes. Denny Brown and Abraham Ryan were also in charge of emptying a small tin ashtray that was kept on a wooden table in one corner of the locker room. Nobody ever sat at this table. Denny did not know why the table was there at all, other than to hold the tin ashtray. An average of four cigarette butts a day collected in that ashtray. Still, since the table was just out of their line of vision, Denny and Abraham sometimes forgot to empty it. Mr. Deering would look in on them and scold them.

“Look sharp now,” Mr. Deering would say. “It’s your job to keep this place looking sharp, boys.”

When Denny described his work at the Monroe Country Club to his mother, she shook her head. She said, “That is
exactly
the kind of job that people in communist countries have.”

Then she laughed. Denny laughed, too.

Although he did not really know what she meant.

Denny Brown (at age fifteen) did not know how he had suddenly come to be Russell Kalesky’s best friend. He did not know how he had suddenly come to be Paulette Kalesky’s boyfriend. Both events had occurred within a month of graduation from tenth grade.

Russell Kalesky and Paulette Kalesky were brother and sister, and they were neighbors of Denny’s. As a little kid, Denny Brown had been bullied senseless by Russell Kalesky. Russell was a year older than Denny. Not a big child, but a mean one. These were some of Russell’s favorite games—playing with fire in Denny’s house, throwing eggs at Denny, treating Denny’s pets roughly, and stealing Denny’s toys to tuck behind the wheels of parked cars. Also, Russell Kalesky passionately enjoyed punching Denny in the stomach.